take your answer off the air...

Talker's MagazineThe quirky talk radio trade mag. Check the Talk Radio Research Project- it's not very scientific, but places on the top 15 talkers list (scroll down to Talk Radio Audiences By Size)) are as hotly contested as Emmys (and mean just about as much).

The AdvocateNo, not THAT Advocate... it's the Northwest Progressive Institute's Official Blog.

Media MattersDocumentation of right-wing media in video, audio and text.

Orcinushome of David Neiwert, freelance investigative journalist and author who writes extensively about far-right hate groups

Hominid Views"People, politics, science, and whatnot"
Darryl is a statistician who fights imperialism with empiricism, gives good links and wry commentary.

Jesus' General An 11 on the Manly Scale of Absolute Gender, a 12 on the Heavenly Scale of the 10 Commandments and a 6 on the earthly scale of the Immaculately Groomed.

Irrational Public Radio "informs, challenges, soothes and/or berates, and does so with a pleasing vocal cadence and unmatched enunciation. When you listen to IPR, integrity washes over you like lava, with the pleasing familiarity of a medium-roast coffee and a sensible muffin."

The Moderate VoiceThe voice of reason in the age of Obama, and the politics of the far-middle.

News Hounds Dogged dogging of Fox News by a team who seems to watch every minute of the cable channel so you don't have to.

HistoryLinkFun to read and free encyclopedia of Washington State history. Founded by the late Walt Crowley, it's an indispensable tool and entertainment source for history wonks and surfers alike.

right-wing blogs we like

The Reagan WingHearin lies the real heart of Washington State Republicans. Doug Parris runs this red-meat social conservative group site which bars no holds when it comes to saying who they are and who they're not; what they believe and what they don't; who their friends are and where the rest of the Republicans can go. Well-written, and flaming.

Boortz had planned the Happy Ending prior to his last air date of Jan 18th. From Radio Online and his Facebook page he gushes:

"Thanks to the 4,650 people who came to my
Happy Ending party at the Fox Theater in Atlanta last night," Boortz
posted on his Facebook page. "You're my extended family -- LOVE YOU. And
thanks to my Happy Ending guests! Banks & Shane, our emcee Chuck
Dowdle, Sean Hannity, Jeff Foxworthy, Rush (no last name needed), a nice
greeting from Larry the Cable Guy, Jamie Dupree, Herman Cain, Clark
Howard, Erick Erickson, Monica Pearson, the two women I love the most to
whom I'm not related, Belinda and Cristina, and my family, THE QUEEN,
of course, and my daughter, Laura and her husband. The grandbaby stayed
home taking care of a babysitter. Oh ... and Hannity, The Queen and I
closed down a particular bar at 2:30 last night. That was the
after-party. Love you all -- mean it -- and Royal was deeply missed."'

Boortz is known for creating the kind of on-air controversy his contemporaries live for.

The day after the Nov election, Boortz compared the President to Ted Bundy and Hitler. We've noticed a lot of talk show hosts lately with a fascination with a black Hitler.

Even Hogans Heroes had to be careful when using Ivan Dixon to impersonate a Nazi and only at night.

Boortz also claimed President Obama "is a bigger disaster to this country than 9-11." That comment drew harsh criticism from 9-11 victims' families. According to Talkers Magazine, Boortz holds a national audience of about 6 million weekly listeners, 200 stations.

We find it hard to believe since only so many hosts can claim 6 million listeners and also since his show is not heard around here.

He was ranked by the magazine as the 13th most influential radio talk host in the nation this year.

Overly paid, fatuous hosts parroting fear mongering while the establishment of the right remains rudderless due to in-fighting from the grassroots and with an extremely wealthy candidate, oblivious to mainstream America making Chevy Chase's SNL Ford character look ready for the job.

voter fraud found at country club

Rich chose the week of the GOP convention to chronicle his findings in the NY Times piece... "On the sixth day, I listened to Glenn Beck, and I saw that he was good. Or if not exactly good, then honest-to-God funny."

"I had tuned in as part of a thought experiment then entering its final
lap: an attempt to put myself in the Republican brain by spending a
solid week listening to, watching, reading, surfing, and otherwise
gorging on conservative media. As would also be true of an overdose of
liberal media, it was lulling me into a stupor, and I was desperate for a
jolt. Beck provided exactly that, in the form of comedy, and to my
astonishment, I found myself laughing out loud—with him, not at him."

Beck provides more comic relief for Rich: "In Beck’s fantasy, someone in the Romney camp did have qualms about
letting an 82-year-old geezer vamp with an empty chair. But the skeptic
had been overruled by a higher-up saying just “three magic words”—to
wit, “It’s Clint Eastwood!” As in: “What could possibly go wrong? It’s Clint Eastwood!” Beck kept repeating this scenario with ever-more-manic variations, turning “It’s Clint Eastwood!” into a burlesque tagline akin to Gene Wilder’s crazed “No way out!” in The Producers
(a Beck favorite). Only at the end of his shtick did politics intrude.
Unless the person who said the three magic words “now has been
terminated,” Beck said, he wouldn’t “trust Mitt Romney’s ability to run
the country.” As he explained, it was only a small step from “It’s Clint Eastwood!” to “It’s Ben Bernanke!”—and the next thing you know, a Romney administration would be extending the term of the despised Fed chairman. He had a point."

Rich was referring to the week that was in Tampa with Clint Eastwood rambling to an empty chair. Said Beck, " “I love Clint Eastwood”—but confessed he’d found the performance “painful to look at.”

Rich feels empathy for the foot soldiers of the conservative movement, even before this week's, all but concession speech from the establishments hope and no-spare change pick of Willard Romney. Rich continues, "... those in the right’s base, who are often sold out by the GOP
Establishment, and admiration for a number of writers, particularly the
youngish conservative commentators at sites like the American Conservative and National Review Online
whose writing is as sharp as any on the left (and sometimes as
unforgiving of Republican follies) but who are mostly unknown beyond
their own ideological circles."

The praise for R$money from the inner circle of conservative writers and hosts was faint but dutiful: "In The Weekly Standard,Andrew Ferguson saluted Mitt
as “a good guy” only after cataloging his “breathless, Eddie Attaboy
delivery, that half-smile of pitying condescension in debates or
interviews when someone disagrees with him, the Ken-doll mannerisms, his
wanton use of the word ‘gosh.’ ” Mike Huckabee tried for a homespun maxim: “If you’ve just been diagnosed with a brain tumor, you honestly don’t care if your neurosurgeon is a jerk.”

Never mind the fact that Bush' 41/43 were not invited to the confab in Tampa, nor was the last candidate for the WH treated any more than as a country cousin, "John ­McCain was as welcome in Tampa as Banquo’s ghost; even Bill
O’Reilly’s much-hyped prime-time interview with the 2008 standard-bearer
was abruptly truncated for a generic podium speech by Romney campaign
chairman Bob White." Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford were non-mentions but Reagan re-digitized for the Jumbo-Tron was brought out after the 2008 edition nearly shredded was remastered.

After a Monday afternoon of Chris Matthews lobbing a stink-bomb at GOP Chair Reince Priebus, over a birther joke Romney made, FOX news permanently bolted cameras at the delegations of Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, American
Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, or the District of Columbia, all
of which, preposterously enough, were given prime seats near the stage in Tampa.

Sez Rich, "Even now, the GOP seems oblivious to the fact that its alliance with
Donald Trump, the nation’s preeminent birther, is enough to cancel out
any serious outreach to African-Americans in 2012. Were it not for
Isaac, Trump might have hijacked the convention on opening night."

Speaking of celebrity, Frank's column also points out how the right uses the has beens of late 80's SNL members Dennis Miller, Victoria Jackson and Jon Lovitz , while Chris Christie's adoration of rocker Bruce Springsteen is not reciprocated.

Beck's disaffection continues with the establishment right, " The morning after opening night in Tampa, Beck fretted aloud about
whether anyone had been watching at all. He was equally nettled by a
study showing that conservatives “just don’t do viral stuff.” Saying
that the right doesn’t share speeches like Ann Romney’s with friends and
that the left does, he asked, “Are we even in the game at this point?” I
thought Beck was being histrionic, but my own anecdotal experience that
week bore him out: The Twitter feeds I followed of conservative voices,
pundits, and institutions generated far less volume and snark than
their liberal counterparts. “Got an awesome hug from the convention info
lady at the terminal,” read an all-too-typical missive from one of the more prolific conservative tweeters, Jonah Goldberg."

free-loading states for Romney

Rush Limbaugh infuriated at the grassroots movement of the right: At the start of convention week, he replayed a Bill Kristol admonition, delivered the day before on Fox News Sunday,
that the convention had to advance a positive agenda. “So what he’s
basically saying is, ‘Don’t make the convention about bashing Obama,’ ” was how Limbaugh translated Kristol’s advice.
He was having none of it. “I think it’s been a trick the Democrats have
used for decades, and I’m stunned that our side keeps falling for it,”
he said. “The trick is: ‘These Independents don’t like criticism! They
don’t like raised voices! They don’t like partisanship! It makes them
nervous. And whenever the Republicans get critical of President Obama,
these Independents just run right back to the Democrats and vote for
them.’ I don’t believe that for a minute!”

Micheal Savage was sickened by “the eunuchs in the Republican Party,”. Says Savage (570 the new and more KKKVI) "..“Just what we need … a man who may be president, that he does his own laundry!” after Ann "you people" Romney claimed her husband is just like us going down to the wash house.

"Now you understand why the tea-party movement arose, and now you
understand why they haven’t even mentioned the tea party … I have no
idea what they stand for.” And he was still just warming up. “The
Republicans have just dug their own grave,” Savage continued. “Unless Romney
gets up there like a man and stops acting like a pocketbook carrier for
his wife, he is finished.”

Another bile-filed response came from Mark Levin, "Obama is “a nasty, leftist ideologue” and to say otherwise is to
emasculate the Republicans’ case against him. “Do we really have to be
driven by focus groups, by Frank Luntz?” he asked. Noting the lousy
convention ratings, he added: “If we’re trying to reach out to Reagan
Democrats and Independents, apparently a lot of them weren’t watching.”
Soon he was taking a call from a Republican election officer who was so
put off by the convention that he said he would vote for Romney but not
go door-to-door to corral others to do so."

Rich points out that the overplaying of the Eastwood video may have done more harm than good by downplaying the anger of the those behind the scenes while relying on “more in sorrow than anger” political strategy.

Frank Rich sums up his adventure in fear and loathing media: "That anger is certain to rage long past Election Day, and if I learned
anything in my week strolling around the conservative mind, it was that
anyone who sticks to an exclusive diet of lame-stream media is missing
the news."

May 07, 2012

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a Fox News contributor, tea party activist and personal friend of Sean Hannity’s said in a sermon recently published to YouTube that America’s greatest mistake was allowing women the right to vote, adding that back in “the good old days, men knew that women are crazy and they knew how to deal with them.”

In the video, published to YouTube in March, Peterson explains that he believes women simply can’t handle “anything,” and that in his experience, “You walk up to them with a issue, they freak out right away. They go nuts. They get mad. They get upset, just like that. They have no patience because it’s not in their nature. They don’t have love. They don’t have love.”

Despite his statements being online for more than a month, Hannity welcomed Peterson on his show last weekto castigate the Obama administration over “taking credit” for the Osama bin Laden assassination — but the segment didn’t exactly go as planned.

In his March sermon, Peterson adds that Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown Law student who recently spoke to a House Democratic hearing on contraception coverage, was actually revealing “all the sex” college students are having. “It’s really all about maintaining the freedom to kill babies in the womb,” he says. “Women are now degraded. Women have no shame.”

At roughly 8:30 into his 12-minute sermon, he doubles down, amazingly, saying that he believes America went wrong when it gave women the right to vote.

“I think that one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote,” Peterson says. “We should’ve never turned this over to women. And these women are voting in the wrong people. They’re voting in people who are evil who agrees with them who’re gonna take us down this pathway of destruction.”

“And this probably was the reason they didn’t allow women to vote when men were men. Because men in the good old days understood the nature of the woman,” he adds. “They were not afraid to deal with it. And they understood that, you let them take over, this is what would happen.”

Peterson, founder of the conservative religious group Brotherhood of a New Order of Destiny (BOND), appeared on the Fox News Channel on May 1, more than a month after giving his controversial sermon. Fox News host Kirsten Powers even confronted Peterson about his “mysogynistic” speech and challenged Hannity to repudiate it, but the Republican opinion host did not, and instead gave Peterson a platform to denounce “liberal, women policies.”

Speaking to Peterson on May 1, Powers protested his appearance on Hannity’s show, explaining that she was “hijacking” it because “I didn’t know I was going to be on with him.” She then accused him of “using God’s word to teach misogyny.”

“I don’t know if you noticed or not, but the liberal Democrat womens are calling themselves whores,” Peterson replied. “They came out with their so called group of women who are within the Democrat party, and they are admitting that they’re whores and they are saying that they are proud of it. I’m okay with that, I just don’t want to pay for it.”

“I have a responsibility to tell the truth,” he added “You’re on the side of lies. Why shouldn’t I be on the side of truth? And it’s the truth that’s gonna make us free. Somebody gotta tell the truth, so I’m going to tell the truth.”

That “truth,” it would seem, isn’t just about liberal women, or even women in general. Peterson made headlines in January after telling a Huffington Post reporter that he would like to see black people put “back on the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working… They need a good hard education on what it is to work.”

Peterson has also been on the leading edge of racially-motivated Republican attacks on Planned Parenthood, alleging at a press conference in 2008 that the group is responsible for killing “over 1,500 black babies” every day.

April 26, 2012

We usually reserve this for the likes of Dori Monson, but since Herr Dori has been on his best behavior promoting driver's ed videos on his show, we thought we'd scan around the dial and see what the other dullards were opining about.

It seems the poor and underfed according to Sean Hannity are doing just fine, thank you if they would only cut out "the soda and drink more water". Never mind the fact that soda consumption among teens has been falling. "Good wholesome" food is readily available too if the poor would just look at the myriad of choices.

A report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture on food insecurity in America released in September 2011 found that "in 2010, 17.2 million households in America had difficulty providing enough food due to a lack of resources."

Food insecurity rates were substantially higher than the national average for households with incomes near or below the current federal poverty line ($22,350 for a family of four), households with children headed by single women or single men, and black and Hispanic households.

Herr Hannity blames the fact that most of the poor he has dined with have too many of the things he has too like 2 color tv's (do they make any other TV besides a color tv?) and "other things" which obviously has led to their nutritional decline.

March 05, 2012

Rush Limbaugh is the exact opposite of any moral standard the LDS (Mormon) Church professes to uphold.

Bonneville International, who owns KIRO and the Rush Limbaugh-bearing KTTH is owned outright by the LDS Church.

Rush Limbaugh is in big trouble. Mitt Romney (the country's most famous Mormon) is in big trouble for his tepid response to Rush's slut-shaming tirade against this young woman exercising her political rights in the nation's capitol.

Bonneville and the LDS Church would go a long way towards some community respect in this town, if they had the courage to drop Rush from KTTH. It should be simple- they outlined some good reasons in 2009 in their Code of Deseret Media.

While we're not terribly optimistic they will live up to these stated principles (they've had many opportunities), we're hopeful that this latest porqueria from Big Pants will be the camel's straw.

The Code was supposed to force a “‘reawakening to righteousness,’ and be a ‘puritanical purge’ and series of ‘reorganizations’ at the Deseret News [their flagship paper] that replaced experienced reporters and editors with younger, more light-filled, devout [and cheaper] people.”

They made a big deal of removing Sean Hannity from their mother station, KSL in Salt Lake City in deference to their Code. But they didn't touch the delusional pig, Glenn Beck, or Hannity in markets like Seattle. They did cut the mic of vile reactionary scum, Michael Savage in Seattle, but for the most part, kept the wingers that pulled the ratings.

To Bonneville: there will be a backlash, we assure you. This is a progressive town which has a long history of honoring women in the public and private sectors.

Do the right thing and be rid of this man.

He dishonors you, the women of Seattle, and his stinking up of the airwaves bodes ill not only for Romney's future (your dreams of mainstreaming your faith in this country rest heavily in his candidacy) but also for building respect for your faith in this community.

February 10, 2012

Bonneville's KSL.com in Salt Lake City - the same fine, moral, LDS-owned folks who yanked Sean Hannity because he didn't meet the upstanding corporate code of the company (which also owns Seattle's KIRO-FM and KTTH) - is in trouble for, well, not being very moral. At least, not according to the New York Daily News.

The Mormon Church in Salt Lake City owns one of the most active and unregulated gun sale portals on the web, according to a new report.

An undercover investigation released in December by Mayor Bloomberg's office named KSL.com the third most active gun listings site on the Internet. The online hub came under scrutiny Monday when the news website Buzzfeed revealed Deseret Media Companies, the for-profit arm of the Mormon Church, operates it.

The mayor's report said the site where 1,327 handguns and 1,003 rifles were listed for sale Monday allows buyers and sellers to complete a gun sale without identifying themselves.

What's the problem with this? Well, legally speaking, nothing: Internet gun sales, along with gun shows, are one of the many NRA-inspired loopholes through which drug dealers, felons, mental cases, and other ne'er-do-wells who couldn't pass a background check can get still their firearms - whether cheap handguns or semi-automatics - without needing to bother with one.

If a law enforcement agency wanted to try starting to trace the firearms sold through KSL.com, undoubtedly they'd find that some of those guns were bought by people not legally permitted to have them. Agents from Bloomberg's office showed how easy it would be: "Undercover agents performed integrity checks on [KSL.com], trying to buy guns while declaring openly that they could not pass a legit background check."

In eight of 12 attempts, the seller happily sold the gun to the shady buyer.

Of course, there are plenty of companies out there that make perfectly legal money doing morally dubious things. Most of the Fortune 500, for example. But Bonneville - the parent company of Deseret Media - has a couple of very particular questions to answer about this debacle:

1) What the hell is a TV/radio web site (the Bonneville equivalent in Seattle is mynorthwest.com) doing operating one of the nation's biggest, and apparently shadiest, online gun bazaars? (Though to be sure, if advertising guns directly on air were legal, the potential for personal testimonials by the air talent is nearly unlimited.)

2) What the hell happened to Deseret Media Company's mission- the one that got Hannity dumped - to "be trusted voices of light and knowledge reaching hundreds of millions of people worldwide"? Which of its corresponding "values" are being upheld by selling truckloads of guns to thugs?

Is it the part about promoting "integrity, civility, morality, and respect for all people"?

Ah! Found it! It's covered in Deseret's statement under "Improve Lives," the bit about "to lift, inspire, and help others find enduring happiness." Happiness, after all, is a warm gun.

Whoops. My bad. The real Bonneville value reflected by running guns - and, for that matter, broadcasting Glenn Beck and Dori Monson - is right at the top of its values statements: "I honor principles espoused by our owner in the products and services I provide."

January 13, 2012

After desperately casually ransacking the Internets shopping online for a product that would make our dick thick and kick-start reinvigorate our love life, we were briefly encouraged hearing the earnest lady lawyer on sports radio KIROAM promoting a product called Retoxor.

Wow! The Mormon Church, who owns the KIROs (and konservative KTTH) have long turned down ads for alcohol, the lottery, casinos, and sex-related products. So we figured that "the outer liquid capsule of Retoxor must really be "medically proven," and would definitely, no doubt "ensure a rapid and almost instant uptake of the clinical tissue-stimulating ingredients, [to go] to work widening benefits," as promised.

We could almost feel the widening benefits starting to surge. We dreamed the old dream of marching with the Terrible Swift Sword into heretofore unconquered "clinical tissues." Retoxor was, after all, "Discovered by Three Former Medical University Students."

With our implicit trust in Mormon business ethics, and having known many former medical university students, we asked ourselves? "what could go wrong?"

Made us wonder why Bonneville would accept this advertising. In the first place, they broke their own rule by accepting the sex-based product, thinking, apparently, they could get away with it by running these spots only on sports radio, where some of the listeners are weak, sad, and desperate men (like ourselves) who tune-in daily for sporting affirmations of their (our) masculinity.

That the product is the object of so many scam and fraud complaints is another matter- but hey, caveate emptor, sucker- this here's free market capitalism.

Bonneville International isn't just owned by some jack Mormons, it's owned outright by the LDS Church. According to Salt Lake City Tribune reporter, Glen Warchol, this ain't the first time they've seen to be blind to their own stated principles. The Code of Deseret Media was installed in 2009 and was supposed to force a “‘reawakening to righteousness,’ and be a ‘puritanical purge’ and series of ‘reorganizations’ at the Deseret News [their flagship paper] that replaced experienced reporters and editors with younger, more light-filled, devout [and cheaper] people.”

They made a big deal of removing Sean Hannity from their mother station, KSL in Salt Lake City in deference to their Code. But they didn't touch the delusional pig, Glenn Beck, or Hannity in markets like Seattle. They did cut the mic of vile reactionary scum, Michael Savage in Seattle, but for the most part, kept the wingers that pulled the ratings.

You don't have to dig deep to uncover the hypocrisy of this religious institution, which is so often the case with institutional religions... especially the ones involved in for-profit business.

But the LDS Church, because of Mitt Romney, will soon be given the colonoscopy of a presidential campaign. They might be well-advised to pick off such low-hanging fruit as this.

They most certainly did, but only after Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry took after Romney's Bain Capital, and its "predatory" business practices.

Turns out, predatory practicin' has been great for Rush, Sean & Glennn: seems... they all work for Bain Capital... who co-owns Clear Channel Communications and their talkers syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks.

What's been the bain of thousands of de-employed radio workers, has be darned good for the few big names.

Clear Channel, among many, many other putrid practices buys up small radio stations, fires all the locals, flips them to talk, and beams down their own talent, Limbaugh & all, from the satellites. They've created the entertainment equivalent of Olive Garden all over the country.

If Romney were elected, he'd be the first president who owned Rush Limbaugh, instead of the other way around. (it won't prevent from kissing Big Pants' nether parts whenever he can ).

January 06, 2012

Gleeky Republican scum Sean Hannity (KTTH m-f, 4-7p) last night passed along Donald Trump's accusitive prediction that President Obama would start a war with Iran to wag-the-dog just in time to help him win the 2012 election. (Ironically, this crowd usually bashes the President because he HASN'T started a war with Iran).

“I say he starts a war with Iran before the election which will make it very hard for the Republican to win,” Donald Trump predicted (again) on Hannity’s radio show yesterday morning. “I think it’s going to happen.” On Fox News Channel, Hannity put the question to his guests:

December 28, 2011

One of the most disturbing trends in politics and radio was exposed in 2011. First there was the Goldline fraud case, involving the skeezy gold-selling company promoted by nearly every conservative talker. Then there was the following: Beware ditto-heads, those opinions spewed by your favorite right-wing spewmaster may have beeen bought & paid for...

A radio biz guru has said, "Any good radio host or exec will tell you that he is in the audience acquisition, retention and expansion business, [in order] to maximize the value of their ad spots."

(photo: Sean Hannity bumps it with a trumpet)

Period. It's the money, baby, not the Star Spangled Banner or family values. So if you still think your favorite firebranding, liberty-loving, uber-patriotic talk host does what he or she does, says what he or she says, out of pure love of god, country, and the American way, you're just a dittohead.

Politico reports that top national radio talkers are being paid million$, literally, for right-wing activist lobbying groups whose messages are not only carried in ad copy, but also swirled into show content with only occasional or casual mentions that their messages are bought and paid for by these sponsors.

(photo: Laura Ingraham got dumped)

Freedom Works, is working hard against front-runner Mitt Romney... and guess what? so is Glenn Beck, who got around $1.4 million from the well-financed Republican phony grassroots "tea-party" front guided by Dick Armey.

Mark LeVin (say it the French way, accented on the 2nd syllable, leh VIN, except mispronounce the 'vin' part to rhyme with 'sin') gets 1.2 million for his sponsorship of Americans For Prosperity, a Koch Brothers-funded astroturf tea party organization.

Levin, whose endorsement deal with the tea party organizing group Americans for Prosperity started last summer, was similarly protective of his sponsor last year after President Barack Obama singled out the group in making the case that anonymously funded attack ads were distorting the midterm elections.

“Americans for Prosperity is a magnificent organization that people join voluntarily. You. Me,” Levin said on his syndicated radio show. Obama, Levin continued, “wants you to hate Americans for Prosperity. So if he wants you to hate it, then you should embrace it, and promote it, and support it and join it, because it’s effective.”

The Heritage Foundation, the grand-daddy conservative bullshit delivery system started this in 2008 by buying-up Laura Ingraham. But they dropped her like an old girlfriend when given the opportunity to pay Rush Limbaugh $2 million and Hannity $1.3 a year to plug membership drives, and defend the well-financed foundation when it's feeling persecuted (which is most of the time).

(Beck and many other conservative talkers have long been integrating their sponsors' messages into their "entertainment" with their 1-2 punch selling gold at incredibly inflated prices. First he predicts a dog-eat-dog Mad Max world after a collapse of the US financial system, (coming any dy, now) then pitches Goldline products as a hedge strategy. Dittoheads are some of the most gullible people in the world, loyal to a fault and willing to believe anything these on-air hucksters sell, whether it's their loopy politics or gold retailed at prices as much as 5-10X the cost on the real market).

It's working and working real good.

Heritage estimates that it in each of the past two years, its sponsorships with Limbaugh and Hannity brought in more than 40,000 new memberships starting at the $25 level, while FreedomWorks said that in the three months after its Beck sponsorship started in April 2010, the group saw a huge spike in traffic to its website (which featured a photo of Beck linked to a fundraising appeal), resulting in 50,000 new email sign-ups.

There's nothing illegal about this, although old broadcast ethics have been flushed ignominiously down the golden executive toilets of these values-thumping whores.

“I wish more of the grassroots knew the reality that this wasn’t Rush or Sean or Beck saying these things out of the goodness of their hearts,” said the leader of one [conservative] group who inquired about ads on various radio shows, but decided they were both too expensive and ethically suspect. “If the grassroots found out that these guys were getting paid seven figures a year to say this stuff, it might leave a bad taste in their mouth.”

Dittoheads manipulated and their loyalty exploited? Nothing new there, but we think such partisan political activism that's bought and paid for should be daylighted like other political advertising.

There is nothing like this on the left. Liberals have this thing about corporate masters and the First Amendment. If it were ever revealed that, say Randi Rhodes or Thom Hartmann were being paid to mix corporate or political sponsors' messaging into their show content, there hell paid would be a career-ending event.

“The point that people don’t realize,” said Michael Harrison, founder and publisher of the talk radio trade publication TALKERS Magazine, “is that (big time political talk show hosts) are radio personalities – they are in the same business that people like Casey Kasem are in – and what they do is no different than people who broadcast from used car lots or restaurants or who endorse the local roofer or gardener.”

The radio-consuming, dittoheaded, conservative basemen don't seem to care: with blind trust they eat what's fed to them... and shell out their bucks and assume the positions as directed.

Watch out for more of this in the election cycle as wingers buy more and more of your favorite talk-jock's time between commercials.

Dittoheads deserve to be suckered, but the rest of us must work hard to stop these messages from slopping over to pollute the mains

KVI am 570 KHz Visit the burnt-out husk of one of the seminal right-wing talkers in all the land. Here's where once trilled the reactionary tones of Rush Limbaugh, John Carlson, Kirby Wilbur, Mike Siegel, Peter Weissbach, Floyd Brown, Dinky Donkey, and Bryan Suits.
Now it's Top 40 hits from the '60's & '70's aimed at that diminishing crowd who still remembers them and can still hear.

KTTH am 770 KHzRight wing home of local, and a whole bunch of syndicated righties such as Glennn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Lars Larsony, and for an hour a day: live & local David Boze.